Digital wireless communication is being widely used throughout the world particularly with the latest development of the Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplex (OFDM systems) and the last evolution, namely the so-called Long Term Evolution (LTE) systems.
With the advent of those new systems and the development of OFDM, the number of communicating cells and users will tremendously increase over one given area.
This will strongly increase the level of interference of the communications between the UEs and the Cells, and improved techniques will be required for canceling the interference resulting from a continuously increasing number of base stations.
As known by a skilled man, the system capacity is limited by means of cell-edge interference. The current release 8 of LTE focused on semi-static techniques for the purpose of properly handling interference between different cells, for instance as shown in FIG. 1, a first cell 100 based on a Base Station eNBs 150, and other cells, such as a second cell 200 based on a eNBs Base Station 250 and a third cell 300 based on a BS 350.
It can be seen in FIG. 1 that communication between a user equipment 110 and its serving base station eNBs 150 may be spoiled by interference produced by the communication of a base station 250 and a base station 350.
Generally speaking, the concept of Fractional frequency re-use was designed for the purpose of reducing interference between two neighboring cells. Nevertheless, Fractional frequency re-use entail constraints on cell-edge scheduling and frequency resources loss which turns as well into a system capacity limitation.
Alternatively, the technique of beamforming was also introduced so as to generate a beam being directed to the actual direction of the relevant UE and thus to reduce the disturbance of the other UE.
All those techniques show the relevance of the problem of inter-cell interference.
The problem to be solved by the present invention is to provide an alternative interference cancellation process which is still effective and simple to carry out.